I'm waffling again on my decision to go all-in on Discord instead of Discourse. After reflecting on #1050506845694992467 , I'm realizing that since Discourse provides an RSS feed for all new posts, it honestly does everything I'd need it to do in order to use it as a proof-of-concept for my "grand vision" thing. everything else I want to build can be done within Yakread. For example: if you subscribe to a Discourse forum's RSS feed with Yakread, I could make Yakread treat it as a "social feed" and mix in the posts with the other social posts from twitter and mastodon, instead of treating it as a "regular" rss feed with blog posts and such. I can have Yakread pick out your own posts from any Discourse feeds you subscribe to and publish your own social feed with posts from all the (Discourse) communities you're in. If you want to include that feed on your site, you can link directly to it. easy peasy--of course substack doesn't let you add random feeds to your site, but ghost does! Yakread + Discourse + Ghost would be sufficient to demonstrate all the proof-of-concept stuff that I want to demonstrate, basically. And using existing apps for the publishing and discussion bits is quite possibly a stronger path to take than using custom code for all three. Besides being less code for me to write, it demonstrates that this vision I'm pushing doesn't depend on building some giant new ecosystem from scratch--we just need to take the stuff we have and make it work together a bit more smoothly. ON THE OTHER HAND I do like being able to have a #958102014733189191 text chat channel to go along with the forum channels :). I'm just not sure that it's enough to justify going with Discord since I mainly just want a traditional forum and that's exactly what Discourse is ha ha.